Obama spikes the football

Finally, President Barack Obama can say his health care law is beating the expectations.

Well, one of them, anyway. It’s safe to say that no one — not even him — predicted that the Obamacare sign-ups would soar as high as 8 million, the figure he announced in an appearance in the White House briefing room Thursday. That number, at least on its face, truly does go beyond the enrollment goals the administration set for itself — and makes the recovery from the website debacle even bigger.

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That doesn’t mean the number tells everything the public needs to know about who’s really covered, of course. And not all of Thursday’s numbers beat the expectations — the share of young adults still isn’t ideal, according to some health care experts.

But the final enrollment numbers, along with other recent survey findings, are strong enough to give the Obama administration a cushion against some of the most common criticisms of the enrollment trends. Here are the takeaways from Thursday’s announcement:

Obama spikes the football

OK, Obama’s proud of the final enrollment number. We got it.

Technically, Obama’s appearance in the White House briefing room was unscheduled, but White House aides had been hinting at it for hours — suggesting that this time, they actually want reporters to be there. This time, Obama wouldn’t look miserable taking his hits for the clumsy rollout and telling reporters that “we screwed it up.”

This time, Obama repeated the new sign-up figure twice so no one missed it: “Eight million people. Eight million people.”

He rattled off other numbers, too, which were helpfully circulated in a White House fact sheet at the same time: 3 million Americans enrolled in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, 3 million young adults who have been able to stay on their parents’ plans, and 5 million people enrolled in health plans that meet Obamacare standards but were sold outside the health insurance exchanges.

“We’ve got a sizable part of the U.S. population now that are, for the first time in many cases, in a position to enjoy the financial security of health insurance,” Obama said.

He felt confident enough to blast the Republicans for their “endless, fruitless repeal votes” and to declare — in a phrase that Republicans are vigorously disputing — that “the repeal debate is and should be over. The Affordable Care Act is working.”

And when a reporter brought up the Affordable Care Act during the question-and-answer session, Obama chimed in, “Yeah, let’s talk about that!”

Still a lot of buts

There are still key details that the White House hasn’t included in past enrollment announcements, and it didn’t this time either. The numbers still don’t say how many of the 8 million people have paid their premiums, because they’re not officially enrolled until they’ve paid. The best estimates from the insurance industry have suggested that anywhere from 15 percent to 20 percent haven’t paid yet, though at least some of those have been trying and some will likely settle their bills.

And the numbers still don’t tell us how many of the new customers were uninsured before, and how many were just swapping out one health insurance plan for another.

In fact, the Obama administration didn’t release a full enrollment report on Thursday, as was widely expected. Instead, it just circulated the topline figures in the White House fact sheet, which gave health care experts — and the critics — less information to go on.

And when it did release the numbers, it played up the best ones. The number that leaked early in the day was the age mix: 35 percent of the people who signed up in the federal health insurance exchange were under age 35. But that figure includes children. The number that mattered more to most health care experts was the young adults age 18 to 34 — and 28 percent of the new customers were in that group.

That’s “almost identical” to the share of young adults who signed up in Massachusetts, under the health care reform law that became the model for Obamacare, according to MIT’s Jonathan Gruber, who consulted on the design of both laws.

But the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Larry Levitt said that number is “still short of the target population” of young adults. He added, though, that it looks “decent enough” to keep premiums stable for next year.

The buts matter less

Republicans hammered away at the lack of information on which customers have paid and which ones were uninsured — and they’re both valid questions that health care experts and journalists are trying to determine, too.

But based on the latest evidence, it’s looking less likely that either question is urgent enough to sink the health care law.

For one thing, the 8 million sign-ups is a high enough figure that even if you take the highest estimate of unpaid customers — 20 percent — and remove all of them from the tally, that still leaves 6.4 million people. And that assumes that none of the unpaid customers will ever pay their bills, when the likelihood is that at least some will.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin of the conservative American Action Forum, a frequent critic of the law, was unimpressed by the lower figure, but he didn’t depict it as a disaster.